Comment 92 for bug 447892

From more testing downstream it seems that the story of this bug is already well documented at bug 21826. The freeze that most people experience today is triggered by the patch http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.31.y.git;a=commit;h=7abf3aa8294d95e3f0be375f30e8d933f874ada0 (already mentioned in comment #17). That this commit caused frequent freezes is clear from comments #26 and #27 in bug 21826.

Bug 21826 was originally about infrequent freezes that happened before that commit. It has also been observed downstream that reverting to a kernel before that commit stops the immediate freezes, but it will still freeze.

In ubuntu we currently have 8 open bug reports [1] for what seems to be this same problem on 855GM. In total they have 54 unique subscribers, which makes it one of the highest profile graphics issues in the ubuntu bug tracker.

So far we have identified the commit that started the freezes, we have batchbuffer dumps attached here and many more in the downstream bug reports. Some people have tried to downgrade the intel driver to see if it would stop the freezes, but the results have been negative so far. Is there anything more we can do without knowing the details about how this hardware works?

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bugs?field.tag=855gm%20freeze&field.tags_combinator=ALL